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Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges

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Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges

Which schools do the best job crafting technology leaders? The Daily Beast tabulated alma maters of more than 250 industry tycoons and execs to determine which colleges turn out greatness.

04.30.10 3:26 PM ET

Courtesy of Dartmouth College

#1, Dartmouth College

Undergraduate Enrollment: 4,147
Notable Alums: Enrique Salem, CEO Symantec; John Donahoe, CEO Ebay
Tech Feature: The
Dartmouth Regional Technology Network, a private, non-profit technology incubator designed to help burgeoning tech companies realize their goals and take root in the Northeast.
Alumni Innovation: Not all Dartmouth grads take technology seriously. Steve Russell ‘58 led the team that developed one of the first videogames,
Spacewar!, in 1962.

2. Stanford University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 6,532
Notable Alums: Thomas Edsall, CTO Cisco Systems; Paul Wehrley, COO Clicker
Tech Feature: The
Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab examines how computers and technology influence day-to-day decision making in a field of research called captology.
Alumni Innovation: David Packard and William Hewlett founded Hewlett-Packard in 1939, five years after they graduated, with $538 in startup capital and a garage to work out of. The company has far exceeded its modest beginnings, with a market value of $122 billion. Two Stanford students again changed the world decades later when Sergey Brin and Larry Page (while working on their master’s degrees) created an algorithm that evolved into the search engine they dubbed Google.

Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications / Princeton University

3. Princeton University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 4,878
Notable Alums: Eric Schmidt, CEO Google; Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon
Tech Feature: The
Center for Information Technology Policy researches how technology interacts with society at large, with a focus on economics and public policy.
Alumni Innovation: The Internet as we know it probably wouldn’t be the same without David Boggs ‘72, who co-invented Ethernet, a high speed cable-based information delivery system, while working for Xerox in 1975.

AP Photo,Lisa Poole

4. Harvard University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 10,156
Notable Alums: Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft; Mark Bregman, CTO Symantec
Tech Feature: The
Office of Technology Development ensures that science and technology breakthroughs are available to underserved communities and the general public.
Alumni Innovation: J. Robert Oppenheimer ‘25 is often called the “father of the atomic bomb”, instrumental in the Manhattan Project and developing the weapon that shapes politics and ethics around the world to this day.

AP Photo

5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Undergraduate Enrollment: 4,153
Notable Alums: Colin Angle, CEO iRobot; Eric Brandt, CFO Broadcom
Tech Feature: The
Women's Technology Program offers a four-week summer residential boot camp to steer women in high school toward studies in engineering.
Alumni Innovation: You know those glass globes that appear to be filled with electricity that's attracted to the touch? They're at just about every local science museum. Well, Bill Parker '74 invented the modern version. The globes are actually filled with a high-voltage gas and are called plasma globes or plasma lamps.

Jim R. Bounds / AP Photo,Jim R. Bounds

6. Duke University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 6,496
Notable Alums: William Hawkins, CEO Medtronic; Leslie Jones, CIO Motorola
Tech Feature: The
Duke Digital Initiative provides the tech leaders of tomorrow with modern learning resources, including microprojectors, iPods, webcams, and social networks.
Alumni Innovation: A quirkier contribution to the world of innovation:
The Beer Launching Fridge.

7. Northwestern University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 9,336
Notable Alums: Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy; Paul Sagan, CEO Akamai
Tech Feature: The
Innovation and New Ventures Office helps inventors navigate the path from idea to patented idea to marketable product.
Alumni Innovation: Richard Skrenta '89 is responsible for what's believed to be the first self-replicating computer virus. Created in 1982, the Elk Cloner attacked Apple computers. A poem would appear on the screen of an infected computer every 50th bootup: "Elk Cloner: The program with a personality/It will get on all your disks/It will infiltrate your chips/Yes, it's Cloner!/It will stick to you like glue/It will modify RAM too/Send in the Cloner!" Skrenta wrote the virus when he was still in high school, so don't blame Northwestern.

Bill Adams / Landov,BILL ADAMS

8. Lehigh University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 4,876
Notable Alums: Wendell Weeks, CEO Corning; John Gardner, COO LearnVest
Tech Feature: The
Launch-IT Program encourages Lehigh Valley 6th to 12th graders toward careers in information technology.
Alumni Innovation:Jesse Reno—class of 1883—built the world's first working escalator, which was installed at Coney Island in 1895 as a ride. He also drew up plans in 1896 for a double-decker subway system, which was rejected by New York City.

Michael Marsland / Yale University

9. Yale University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 5,277
Notable Alums: Todd Sullivan, CEO Chyngle; Scott Young, CMO Radio Shack
Tech Feature: At the
Initiative in Science, Religion and Technology students of the Yale Divinity School think critically about how religion, science, and technology interact.
Alumni Innovation: Paul MacCready '47 was a pioneer of aerodynamics and was named Engineer of the Century in 1980. His inventions include the first human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Condor, and several solar-powered aircraft.

Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University

10. Johns Hopkins University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 5,577
Notable Alums: Samuel Palmisano, CEO IBM; Ari Balogh, CTO Yahoo
Tech Feature: The
Technology Transfer encourages researchers to develop their ideas into companies and share their knowledge with the world.
Alumni Innovation: Before Michael Bloomberg '64 gained national prominence as the mayor of New York City, his company developed a machine that changed the financial world and made Bloomberg a billionaire. The Bloomberg Terminal allows paid subscribers access to the proprietary Bloomberg data service, which during pre-Internet times was especially unique for providing real-time stock quotes and other financial data.

Courtesy of UCLA

12. UCLA

Undergraduate Enrollment: 26,536
Notable Alums: Henry Samueli, CTO Broadcom; Rich Sulpizio, CEO Qualcomm
Tech Feature: The $829 million, state-of-the art
Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical CenterAlumni Innovation: Steve Crocker '68 was one of many engineers responsible for developing the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which would become the model for the Internet. Crocker was also instrumental in creating the Request for Comments series, an academic publishing platform that Internet researchers use to communicate new ideas and concepts.

Courtesy of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

13. University of Illinois

Undergraduate Enrollment: 31,417
Notable Alums: Susan Bostrom, CMO Cisco Systems; Kevin Lynch, CTO Adobe
Tech Feature: The
Technology Entrepreneur Center, the University of Illinois' technology incubator.
Alumni Innovation: Ed Boon '86 isn't known for being a violent guy, but he did co-create Mortal Kombat, one of the first mass-market videogames to feature lifelike blood and guts.

Courtesy of Loyola ,

14. Loyola University-Chicago

Undergraduate Enrollment: 10,124
Notable Alums: Robert Parkinson, CEO Baxter International; Kenneth Meyers, CFO Telephone and Data Systems
Tech Feature: The
Innovations in Leadership program brings together four teams of medical professionals to research patient care and services.
Alumni Innovation: Quality management—basically the system that managers use to ensure their companies provide high-quality products—is taken for granted by most American consumers. But the concept wouldn’t exist without Joseph M. Juran '35, a major theorist of standardized quality management, whose seminal
Quality Control Handbook was published in 1951.

Courtesy of Baylor University,Robert Rogers

15. Baylor University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 12,162
Notable Alums: Landell Hobbs, COO Time Warner Cable; Mark Hurd, CEO Hewlett-Packard
Tech Feature: The
Baylor Research and Innovation CollaborativeAlumni Innovation: It took until the last half of the last decade of the 20th century, but in 1997 Marjorie Scardino '69 paved new ground as the first female CEO of one of the top 100 British companies, Pearson PLC.

Courtesy of University of Pittsburgh

18. University of Pittsburgh

Undergraduate Enrollment: 17,427
Notable Alums: Ted Schremp, CMO Charter Communications; Robert Henry, COO Harris
Tech Feature: The
Technology Commercialization AllianceAlumni Innovation: Charles Glen King '30 co-discovered Vitamin C and established the relationship between malnutrition and degenerative diseases. King wrote more than 200 academic articles on vitamins, enzymes, and nutrition over his career.

Courtesy of Rutgers

19. Rutgers University

Undergraduate Enrollment: 28,031
Notable Alums: Janet Haugen, CFO Unisys; Michael Christenson, COO CA
Tech Feature: The
Technology Management Research Center marries globalization with innovation.
Alumni Innovation: Stanley Norman Cohen '56 worked on the lab team that in 1974 spliced the first gene, a strand of frog RNA that was transferred into E. Coli cells. This experiment became the basis of the biotechnology industry.

Courtesy of UT at Austin

20. University of Texas at Austin

Undergraduate Enrollment: 37,389
Notable Alums: Michael Dell, CEO Dell; Lee Applbaum, CMO RadioShack
Tech Feature: The
Austin Technology Incubator Alumni Innovation: Modern elections in America were shaped by V.O. Key, Jr. '29, who wrote the influential textbook
Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups. Key's main contribution to political theory was to expand its scope to include the study of public interest groups and regional politics.